Month: July 2016

Continuing in my quest of useless stuff, here is GCC 2.5.8 for EMX as a native Win32 executable set.

With some weirdness of inline not being recognized, I just commented that out. The GCC driver program does have some issues though, and Im just not in the mood to fully figure out why either the EMX or MS-DOS versions can’t correctly capture return codes, or if it was better to just use -pipe and _pipe with _O_TEXT mode set, but again how to figure out if the pipe closed cleanly or with errors? So for now it’ll always assume everything worked, but it will still print errors. Sigh.

With that said, the CC1, CC1OBJ, CC1PLUS drivers all built, so you can use C, ObjectiveC, and C++. yay.

The functional version of this is EMX 0.8H, with the gcc 2.5.8 update. Maybe I’ll put this all on sourceforge so people don’t have to deal with my crappy download system, but for now it’s on my site.

I’ve had one issue with Turbo C++ 3.00 and that is the embedded executable will run out of memory while linking, but invoking it by calling msdos.exe let’s it run fine. If you compile and link separately it’ll run just fine.

I needed to get some business cards, and the usual thing is to use QR codes that have a tiny URL name, that then redirect to your real web site. Easy, right?

Well most people use ‘public’ servers like bit.ly & friends. In china many people I do business with use 1688.com . But this got me thinking, 1688 is a FOUR letter domain, unlike any of the three letter ones that seem to be more common. I know all the one, two and three letter domains are all gone, but are there any four letter domains?

Well ChicagoVPS was bought out, and then they kind of downgraded me from a Xeon to an Atom.. And now they are creeping up the rates. So I saw a special on lowendbox.com for Joe’s Datacentre. I’ll be moving onto a dual proc Xeon L5420 CPU. Maybe not the highest end of boxes, but better than some atom.

I don’t think it’ll mean anything for anyone, other than a blip of an outage when I shut down KVM, and transfer over the blog VM, and update DNS.

I’ve already moved over my BBS and it’s running just fine. Not that it matters but I moved out the ‘vpsland‘ share to another low end cheapo dedicated box at Joe’s for well over a month now, making my decision to move justified.

The new hosting is in Kansas City MO, which is still geographically central in the United States of America. Id love to host it in Hong Kong, but I’ve only received absolutely insane prices out here. And even though I do have a commercial grade internet connection, getting more IP addresses has been an impossibility.

For the past couple of years or so, I have been working on a SIMH-based
simulator for the CDC1700 series, a 16-bit system from the mid-1960’s, using
the documentation and software available at bitsavers. It has now sufficiently
stable to allow others to make use ot the software. The base system implements:

The simulator is able to boot the diagnostic tape (SYSTEM17_SMM_DIAGS.TAP at
bitsavers.org) and successfully execute tests for each of the above
components. Some test sections fail due to various reasons; lack of
documentation, timing issues, feature not implemented etc.

The simulator is also able to boot and install MSOS 5 from an installation
tape (MSOS5_SL136.tap at bitsavers.org) onto a 1733-2 cartridge drive. This
is a copy of a distribution tape provided by CDC to run on a 64KW system at
Exxon.

I would like to thank Doug Gwyn for answering questions about the system
architecture and providing details about specific diagnostics tests and
Al Kossow for for peripheral documentation so that I could get MSOS 5
installed.

I’ve been able to save, restore and go up, down and even die without it crashing so it seems OK to me.

It’s kind of cool to build it with GCC 1.40 on Windows 10, and get a native executable. Maybe pointless in the golden age of emulation / virtualization as you could just as easily build stock 1.3d on a 4.2 BSD VAX, or even 386BSD 0.1 system.

Maybe I’ll finish the work to see if I can get it running on OS/2 or MS-DOS via EMX, but for now the project stuff is on sourceforge.net